More Than Two to Tango: Argentine Tango Immigrants in New York City

3. Argentine Tango Artists: The Craft of Marketing Authenticity

73 chapter three Argentine Tango Artists The Craft of Marketing Authenticity The milongueras have never been as happy as they are today. After a century of dancing tango, they have never been looked at and admired as much as they are today. They have never had so much work; never did they have a passport to travel around the world as artists and masters. In a country such as Argentina with a high unemployment rate, where people over forty get excluded from any job opportunity, female tango dancers can read with satisfaction an announcement such as this one: “Casting: only tango dancers between 20 and 50 years old.” estela dos santos, DE DAMAS Y MILONGUERAS DEL TANGO “Tango immigrants” is the term I have chosen for a diverse group of talented and struggling tango performers (dancers, musicians, and singers) as well as tango entrepreneurs from Argentina who, for more than a decade now, have been seeking to fulfill a dream of success in the United States. Many of these artists, descendants of those creoles and Europeans who held tango as their birthright in Argentina more than a century ago, have been the ones in charge of bringing it abroad. Contrary to the earlier representation of the tango as a Spanish American dance in the United States, its rising global reputation as an Argentine artistic form since the late twentieth century has brought the genre to the summit of the cosmopolitan entertainment market. The complicated footwork amid controlled passionate embraces that the Argentine tango offers to foreign audiences has fed the worldwide demand for Argentine artists. The tango’s popularity as “authentically” Argentine has been enhanced by a sublimated eroticism that is not comprised by other dances, even by more sexually explicit ones such as cumbia or salsa. Far from the sophisticated choreographies that 74 • More Than Two to Tango have continued to make tango popular in exhibitions and on television shows in the United States (e.g., Dancing with the Stars), the latest tangomania has made of this genre an attainable pastime that is accessible to regular folks. This chapter deals with the paths of the younger cohort of tango newcomers , who are twenty to forty-five years old, along with the discursive ways in which they claim a place in the artistic field. To this end, I rely on the concept of “ethnic capital,” which combines the theory of social capital with the properties of ethnic niches, to explain Argentines’ dependence Figure 12. Argentine dancing parlor (milonga) in New York City. (Photographer: Anahí Viladrich) Argentine Tango Artists • 75 on their peers to support their artistic trade. As Zhou and Lin (2005) note, newcomers who arrive in new destinations with limited human capital resources, such as English-language and marketable skills, count more on the social capital that comes from preestablished social networks. In this chapter, the migratory trajectories of some of the most conspicuous tango newcomers are examined in detail. These include “tango converters ,” who have lately chosen the tango as a way of making a living; professional artists who regularly live in New York City; and tango visitors, who perform in the city when on tour (or when invited by their tango pals) and who may eventually settle there. Combined patterns of open ethnic solidarity and subtle interpersonal competition are at stake in these practitioners ’ eagerness to keep their common interests afloat. As a national group, Argentine artists strive to attain dominance in the tango field by relying on employment webs that allow the reproduction of their ethnic capital. This is achieved by a twofold strategy that leads artists to seek business opportunities with their compatriots on the one hand, and to their self-promotion as the genuine interpreters of the “tango passion” on the other. These combined features epitomize the practitioners’ united front in fostering their leadership in the tango field over non-Argentine competitors . By the time Argentine tango had regained success in the early 1990s, there were few professional tango dancers in the United States. As noted by Knauth (2005) in her study on Argentine tango in Pittsburgh, New York City soon became the main hub for Americans eager to learn tango from the “masters,” whose steps would soon be studied and rehearsed in other US cities. Both dancers and tango aficionados from the country’s inner core began looking for well-trained tango instructors, who lived in main cities on the East...